How do you get hundreds of people to attend your event, download your white paper, read your article, buy your service?

This is actually the wrong question.

The right question is: How do you get as many of your ideal clients to take action?

And that is not just with the right title, but with a focused approach.

It’s easy to find online articles on how write irresistible titles: “3 secrets to…” “5 reasons why…” “Are you making these mistakes…” etc. We’re not going to cover that here. Instead, we’ll discuss how to approach your title–before writing it. You see, the title is just the icing on the cake. You need to make sure you’re icing the right cake.

Here are three steps to take BEFORE you write that amazing title:

1. Don’t write the title, plan the event, or hire the copywriter until you’re almost scarily-clear about your audience. Like, they think you know them personally and it kind of freaks them out.

Ever sign up for a seminar based on its title, only to find it isn’t relevant to you at all?

You never want to put anyone else through this. The copywriter may have congratulated herself on those high response rates. But response rates are meaningless if half the attendees vow never to return. You need to know attendees found the seminar valuable, relevant, timely.

The antidote to annoying anyone is focus. Even if focusing means a lower number of overall responses, it also means a higher number of high-quality responses. You’re more valuable to them–which makes them more valuable to you.

2. Specialize on a subset of the audience, and their problem.

You don’t need the whole world. You just need the people who are crazy about you. The people you connect with. The people who want what you have because you can help them solve their problem, meet a need, and get ridiculously successful and happy.

Even if you’re selling something like gumballs, you’d do well to differentiate this way. Who are these gumballs for? When you can narrow it down, you can make a bigger difference.

“Yes, but I don’t want to exclude anyone by picking just one group.”

What happens when you say you’re for everyone, and someone who hires you discovers you’re not right for them at all?

Why not just say whom you’re best for, right from the start?

What if you specialize in helping “business owners and entrepreneurs,” and leave it at that?

Too general. It’s like saying you target employees. Or American people. Or people who drive cars. It’s so broad that most of the people in that group will discover you’re not speaking to them and their needs at all.

Here’s a good example.

Havi Brooks targets business owners and entrepreneurs—but that’s just the broader category. She actually targets a specific type of business owners and entrepreneurs –creative entrepreneurs who feel they’ve got a lot to say but aren’t quite ready to put themselves out there.

See the difference? If you’re a creative entrepreneur who feels that way, you’re going to be sending her fan mail real soon. Which happens quite a bit. Notice she’s not saying “graphic designers.” But she’s clear about the type of person you can really hit home with.

Whatever the size of your budget, focusing is just the smart thing to do.

3. Respect your audience’s time. Deliver on your title’s promise.

How I Spent Saturday Not Phone Banking, Not Eating Pancakes, Not Walking Around Fort Funston with My Dog, and Not Sleeping In

On Saturday I went to a conference for “business owners and entrepreneurs.” Period. No mention of the types of business owners and entrepreneurs. Just. Well. ALL of us. My bad. I learned my lesson.

The title of one of the talks in the agenda was “10 Secrets to Email Marketing.” The actual talk delivered was “Best Practices in Email Marketing.”

When you call your talk “10 Secrets to Email Marketing,” those 10 things had better be secrets.

A best practice is, by definition, something most people already know. A secret is something few people know. Big difference.

So the session actually revealed not secrets but the most obvious facts about email marketing that most of us already know. Example secrets from the talk: “Include your name in the ‘from’ field.” “Let people subscribe to your newsletter from your website.” “Make the subject line descriptive.”

REALLY? These are email marketing secrets? Well, that is the biggest secret of all.

When promoting an event, a webinar, a speech, or a white paper, why would you want people to attend if they won’t find it relevant? What good are responses if they’re not the right responses?

Instead of saying the event is for “business owners and entrepreneurs,” why not be clear and say it’s for “business owners who want someone to slow down and explain all this social marketing stuff in English.”

Isn’t it better to have 250 raving fans than 500 annoyed people who wish they’d slept in and resent you for wasting their time? Sitting through a 45-minute talk on stuff I already know. At 9:30am on a SATURDAY morning. Instead of eating pancakes in bed with my human and my canine. Not fun.

A side effect of not focusing your event is you attract an unfocused audience. The conference let us choose from 10 kinds of name badges organized by industry. But they didn’t have MY industry (the “communications” label actually referred to computer hardware and networking). By attracting a hodgepodge audience, they eliminated any potential benefit of easy networking with likeminded others. So I didn’t have a good reason to stick around. If they didn’t have a name tag for my industry, what were the chances I’d meet anyone in my industry?

The Moral of the Story

Strategy and focus provide juicy steak in times of economic gristle.

Trying to please everyone is wasteful, like giving heavy whipping cream to a dog. The dog gets a stomachache, you regret it later. Finding the right fit means nothing goes to waste. So before you write that amazing title, be sure you’re focusing your event, white paper, and your business. Companies can’t afford to work with generalists. And you can’t afford to be one.